Saturday, November 23, 2013

I just love heritage cooking, which is why I was so excited to find this "very old" recipe in a cookbook I spotted at the little Sandy Spring Museum. Sandy Spring, Maryland was an early Quaker settlement. Though it was a short and simple recipe, I did have to figure some things out first.

I rarely bake anything requiring yeast, so I had to figure out how to convert a yeast cake to the powdered yeast I found at the supermarket (thank goodness for the Internet - I found out 1/2 cake is just about 1 packet of yeast). Then I had to figure out what Martin's Milk was. I figure it was just regular milk, but wanted to be sure. I found a lot of artifacts from MANY different dairy and milk companies with Martin as a family name (who knew?), so I concluded the recipe was calling for regular milk. Then I had to figure out what a "moderate oven" was. I would have defaulted to 350 degrees, which would have been a good move since apparently, many people have also used the search terms "what does bake in a moderate oven mean", again, hurrah for the Internet.

In the end, the bread was...decent. Far from the best bread I've had but it came out of my moderate oven, and even mediocre bread is quite amazing hot and fresh-baked from home.

4 comments:

Hi Wendy. Don't you love those old books? I enjoy perusing old gardening books. It blows my mind when I read that "One should spray the tomato plants..." or whatever. Crazy. The photo of your break looks delicious. The Internet is so helpful, isn't it?

My awesome gardening friends...thanks for leaving a comment! I don't typically repond here, but I love knowing who you are so I can visit your blog as well.

btw - if you're trying to show me nude Miley Cyrus photos, sell me nikes or viagra or antibiotics, or encourage my lovely garden readers to visit your site on solar panel construction, or seo-whatevers, sorry, but I'm not publishing your comment. If you want to moderate my blog - well, I can't keep you too busy, and the pay would be horrible. And lastly, no. I'm not interested in Club Penguin cheat codes. Thanks anyway.

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About Me

I am a high school counselor by day and a landscape architect or possibly farmer in my dreams. I volunteer as a DC Master Gardener. In spare moments, I am a freelance writer with national publication credits. I have also been a symposium speaker. I record my family and garden ramblings on Greenish Thumb for posterity and to share the probably mundane, possibly profoundish thoughts that only other gardeners would smile, nod their heads at and say, "oh, that's so true!". This is also my space to post the photos that we gardeners are endlessly taking - and that our non-gardening friends really could give a *&$^ about.
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